Sure! UnetBootin, is a tool that works very well. As far as thumbdrives go, just get a fast thumbdrive from famous and good brands (sandisk,toshiba,kingston...). Do note that the BIOS must be able to boot from USB thumdrives, if not it will not work.

Timothy Liem

November 28, 2012 at 4:26 pm

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on 4 GB pendrive and it ran well. so, you can do it.

Declan Lopez

November 27, 2012 at 11:57 pm

yes you can, you can use unetbooin and install to any flash drive you want. i have it installed on a 16gb kingston flash drive with 10gb of persistence so i can save changes when i use it again

Mitesh Chudasama

November 26, 2012 at 7:17 am

Hii there,
Yeah, ubuntu need minimum 4.4 gb space for install.

Abba Jee

November 24, 2012 at 12:07 pm

yes it is possible :)

Anonymous

November 12, 2012 at 4:55 pm

ya..it is possible.You can use Universal USB installer to do this.16GB pendrive is too much for this.Even a 2 GB can work better for this purpose.

shaquille lijkwan

November 8, 2012 at 5:10 pm

yes you can search on google for tuts

Kannon Y

November 8, 2012 at 5:39 am

You won't need a 16GB drive - 4GB is probably more than enough for most live installations.

I find that the best way to test out various flavors of Linux is by using a Live USB. The best software for this is LiLi USB Creator. It will turn any flash drive into a bootable copy of Linux. In addition, it will also allow you to virtually run Linux from within another operating system using a software called VirtualBox.

My preference is using live USB drives for recovery solutions. Such as zapping viruses. For such purposes, PartedMagic is easily my favorite. It's also available from within LiLi USB Creator. Basically, LiLi will download the distribution for you. Just follow the directions below:

There are also multiboot solutions, which allow you to boot from any of multiple Linux ISOs on a single pen drive. I've tended to have problems with these kinds of bootable discs, but in case you want to find out more, check out this link.

Adam Campbell

November 7, 2012 at 1:53 pm

yep, use unetbootin, which btw is included in the ubuntu distro. Any pen (flash) drive will work fine

Dhaval Patel

November 7, 2012 at 7:42 am

the minimum free space on hard drive required to install Ubantu 12.04.1 is 10 GB. So, you can install ubantu on any pendrive which have free space more than 10 GB.
thats it

Jim Chambers

November 7, 2012 at 4:38 am

16GB is plenty big enough. Don't use some cheap knock-off or refurb unless you want problems

Jim B.

November 7, 2012 at 3:31 am

Keep in mind that you do not need to install using unetbootin. In fact, I highly recommend against it. Just point the installer to your 16gb flash stick and do a normal install. I have 3 16gb sticks installed in that way. They work 100%. And you have space left over for lots of programs. You can still use a normal HDD while booted off the flash stick so you don't necessarily need to use the stick as your data storage device.

Anonymous

November 6, 2012 at 4:39 pm

hope you got your answer
and in my opinion, 8 Gigs are much more than enough for ubuntu and in the remaining 8 you can install some other linux, might come handy ;)

ha14

November 6, 2012 at 10:20 am

16GB is big enough

if you are trying to run live programs via USB , the performance will always be less than when they have been installed. of course this depends on the system where you use it.

if you want more performance, you can create a Live USB on a pendrive which Supports USB 3.0 . USB 3.0 is faster than USB 2.0.

Blake Andreasen

November 6, 2012 at 7:26 am

unetbootin.sourceforge.net
This will download the ISO and put it on the drive as well

Boni Oloff

November 6, 2012 at 6:41 am

Yes you can. But you need to make sure the pendrive has a good speed so it will not very slow to load.